bit o networking

date:8/15/08
time:11:30pm
place:couch
distance: 100 meters ....oh yeah it's that big

so i thought I'd offer up some use full info on home networking. First in order to shape your traffic corectly you must ask what is your physical topology like? is it the wall jack to the modem then the modem to a router then from the router you've got one Ethernet connection for for each pc? If that is the case then your ISP should only hand you 1 ip address for your router and another one for your voip phone if you have one. If your modem has like two Ethernet ports and you have both computers hooked directly to the modem then you'd get two unique ones.

the whole throttling thing it depends on what router you have. throttling is when you try to control traffic yourself. I've got a dlink router (one of the newer ones) and I also have a desktop that is just for downloading and an everyday use one. How I shape my traffic is using ports Web browsers usually use port 80 for web traffic and p2ps use the higher set of ports usually 2 or 3,000 and above. so what I did was tell my routers QOS (quality of service) to put any traffic going to and from ports 2000 and above in the low priority category. anything else gets a high priority tag on it. This way I can be downloading gigs and gigs of stuff on p2ps all day long and it wont effect the other traffic. Before I implemented this I couldn't do anything online while I was downloading stuff. Now I can download all I want and it doesn't effect my surfing. You can tweak this by finding out specifically what ports each program uses and give priority to the programs you want.

Another way you can do it is via IPs. find out each computers IP address (private address, the one the router assigns to it) and tell your routers QOS to put one as a higher priority than the other. This also works via MAC addresses. The only problem with doing it this way is if you are surfing and downloading on the same computer you will notice lag as appose to shaping via ports.

like I said before it all depends on what router you have. All routers nowadays have some sort of QOS built in. If you have an older one you might have to hack it to get this functionality. also just in case you don't know the way you access your router is through your web browser. Just type in your routers IP address in the address bar and you'll get your browsers interface. different companies have different default IPs so google yours.

and remember routers are our friends not our enemies...yet